The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command

by Andrew Gordon

John Murray $150

This new edition of Andrew Gordon's 1995 naval classic on the Battle of Jutland adds an appendix on the deployment of Admiral Sir John Jellicoe's fleet, and he has fixed 'casual inaccuracies or stylistic infelicities'. Beyond that, he has let his 710-page history stand as, perhaps, the final word on the 1916 naval battle that ended Britannia's rule of the waves. After bringing together 151 vessels in Britain's Grand Fleet and 100 ships of Germany's High Seas Fleet, Gordon breaks off to examine the failure of British military culture to keep pace with technological changes in warfare wrought by the industrial revolution. The lingering historical controversy on Jutland is the failure of command involving Jellicoe and two of his admirals: David Beatty and Hugh Evan-Thomas. Winston Churchill would later say Jellicoe 'was the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon'. US military buffs liken the British obsession with Jutland to that of southern historians and the Battle of Gettysburg.